The Richie Report: The Pea Soup Regurgitation

“Like Linda Fucking”
Bloody hell, Readers. This, the penultimate Richie Report of the year, sees us literally awash with games. Big time, triple A titles as far as the eye can see and it’s all mixed in with all the shit we’ve brought in the Black Friday sales as well.

Chav gamers have literally had their heads spun like Linda fucking Blair. First they get EA’s underwhelming Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Now, they can continue to ape Activision like their name is Bubbles, but the Medal of Honor games are shit. They know it. You know it. And it doesn’t matter how closely they stick to the CoD template, especially when Call of Duty: Ross Kemp 9 followed three weeks later and stole Warfighter’s fanbase away so effectively you’d have thought it came with free scratchcards and vouchers for McCain Micro Chips.

This year, however, I noticed a distinct lack of people playing it. Now it may be that Call of Duty players are hateful twats who have a horrible habit of coming into my party and chat and raping it like a gang of Austrian dads. So, admittedly I’ve culled a lot of them from my friend list, but even so, Black Ops II definitely didn’t do much business this time around.

“Knob or Anything”
Microscrote are not to be outdone though and Halo 4 came along and stole what little thunder was left to go around and is doing particularly well based on how many people are playing it. Hopefully it’ll fuck off soon though because I’m getting sick to fucking death of hearing how someone has just stolen someone else’s fucking Warthog or whatever.

More sedate fun is at hand with Hitman: Absolution. Now I’ve never been a huge fan of Hitman. I’ve enjoyed it at times but I’m not ready to tattoo Agent 47′s barcode onto my knob or anything. Also, I struggled with the pace of Blood Money but Black Friday brought a cheap copy of Absolution into my life and I’m rather liking it. Short levels with tons of replayability. Lovely! The disguise system and badly signposted items can fuck off somewhat and the extra guards on harder difficulties kind of break the level design for me, but overall this is the most fun I’ve had with a full-retail title since Sleeping Dogs. Plus garroting the fuck out of some crimey bastard is always fun and it’s nice to wear a tie in a game for once.

Other big releases are Assassins Creed III, which interests me about as much as a Steps reunion, and Far Cry 3, which is going to be so very huge that any review that drops this side of Xmas can be considered rushed to fuck. Far Cry remains my favourite PC FPS and was basically like a sexy version of Predator: The Game, but Far Cry 2 is probably the sequel I hate the most (since Renegade III on the Spectrum). It was a cunt of a game. An actual cunt. Guns jamming? Cunt. Malaria? Cunt. Actual fucking paper map? Cunt. 50,000 square miles of fuck all? Cunt. Eurogamer have given Far Cry 3 an excited ten out of ten. But they gave Far Cry 2 an eight so who the fuck knows.

“Hate The Laughably Bad”
Those of you with a classical gaming background will be more interested in Under Defeat HD, a swish remake of the end-of-life Dreamcast shoot ‘em up. I know I was, but unfortunately it’s as dull a shoot ‘em up as I’ve played since the original Xevious. It’s marginally unfair too, but the sheer mind-deleting tedium of the by-the-numbers enemies and backdrops make Under Defeat HD a game you should avoid. The relatively easy 1000GS might entice the whores among you though, you slutty streetwalkers (one day max, no worries *ahem*).

The actual biggest game release since our last outing was the fifth and final chapter for The Walking Dead. Despite featuring zombies and being a pointyclicky, I fucking love The Walking Dead. I don’t like the comics and I hate the laughably bad TV show (seriously, it’s shit! What’s wrong with all of you?!) but I love this game so much. The graphics are blaverage and the gameplay is clunky but the story twisted me into fucking pretzls with actual moral choices that I agonised over and it featured Clem, my favourite character in a game ever. If I end up having a kid I’m calling it Clem. Tough luck if you’re a boy, Clem.

PC gamers, as ever, have been well-catered for with A Game of Dwarves (ARGH!) and Chaos on Deponia (is this a game about cough mixture or something? Fuck it, ask Ed about it) as well as all the fucking sweet deals you seem to get on Steam and these Humble Bundle things.

“You’ll Probably Find The Bitter”
Speaking of Humble Bundles. THQ are the focus of the latest one. Pay whatever you want for a bunch of THQ goodies including Saints Row 3 (which is LOVELY) and Company of Heroes, as well as a heap of other games. THQ are clearly fucked, yo. Bless. That’s what you get for being the first to bring in online passes. How’d that work out for you, THQ? Hmmm? Oh you can’t read this because there are no monitors at the soup kitchen, you scutters.

I guess we should be talking about the Nintendo Wii-U. As ever, Nintendo continue to innovate with their iPad meets Xbox 360 style console and to be fair it does have a few good ideas. This is Nintendo though and once you get past the ‘OH MY GOD IT’S SO GOOD’ reviews from the day one adopters you’ll probably find the bitter aftertaste. With the original Wii, most early adopters found theirs collecting dust as they went back to their proper consoles. Let’s take a look next month and see if anyone is still playing Zombi-U and whatever fucking Mario shovelware they picked up this month.